In this presentation I will review recent efforts to connect
text databases, biographical databases, geographic information
systems, and tools generated from within the humanities
community. I will argue that connecting databases and tools,
open access as well as commercial, is an important mission for
researchers and librarians in Chinese Studies and one that has
been ignored for too long. In the first part of the presentation
I will briefly discuss the limitations of well-known textual
databases in pre-twentieth century and modern Chinese Studies
with regard to search functionality, data discovery,
exportability, and accessibility. Next I will demonstrate how
customized humanities tools can help overcome many of these
limitations, using as an example the basic and new functionality
of the MARKUS platform (dh.chinese-empires.eu/beta). I will
conclude that the generation of humanities-specific platforms
and tools is necessary for the development of Chinese Studies
and compatible with the goals and premises of philological
inquiry. I will also emphasize that the realization of resources
and tools that conform with academic standards and research
flows requires far more engagement from within the Chinese
Studies community and closer collaboration between librarians,
computer scientists, and humanities researchers and teachers.

From
Database to Digital Research Platform: Development and Evolution
of

Buddhism Literary Digital Research Tool

Jen-jou Hung∕associate
professor in Department of Buddhist Studies at

Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts

Over the years scholars have leveraged traditional text-critical
methods to study and compare literary texts so as to explore and
discuss various aspects of important research questions on
literatures. Researchers in the field of Buddhist philology tend
to invest a considerable amount of time in their preliminary
processing of the texts in order to be able to then analyze
their observations and produce scientifically qualified
research. One of the main reasons that lies behind this rather
enormous time-investment required to deal with even
comparatively minor textual issues isthe fact that the traditional philological research
method relies heavily on ‘human power’ to collate information,
analyze results and explain the inferences derived from the
analysis. As a result of this burdensome procedure, large scale
research projects carried out by individual scholars are rarely
seen.

In
recent years, a large number of Buddhist digital resources have
been made available in Taiwan. The development of Buddhist
digital resources in Taiwan has won international fame. The
existing digital resources mostly have great search functions
which provide a very efficient way for looking up a required
part in a given text within a moment. However, the lack of
integration of the existing databases makes the scholars need to
spend much time in bringing the materials from different systems
together. Furthermore, digital philology, as a branch of digital
humanities, with its application to Buddhist materials, is now
opening new research horizons in Buddhist studies. With the help
of computer information technology, we are now able to apply
statistical methods or artificial intelligence algorithms to the
analysis of the existing corpora of digitized texts. However,
the potential of information technology applied to this field of
research has yet to be recognized, let alone fully developed and
introduced as common practice. The performance of quantitative
analysis on digital texts still requires high-level skills in
computer programming and advanced statistical knowledge, which
creates a high barrier for scholars in the humanities who are
now attempting to navigate these tools.

Therefore,
in order to effectively assist humanities scholars in overcoming
the major hindrances to progress in their active use of
computational linguistic resources and information technology in
general, we propose to create an integrated research platform
for Chinese Buddhist Literature. The main features of this
platform are: (1) a variety of digital resources is well
integrated in the platform to provide more comprehensive
research materials for scholars; (2) all high-quality source
data are available for download for users to use in advanced
digital analysis; (3) the platform also integrates the tools
that are used by the digital researches to guide textual
scholars who are using digital tools and method in forming,
re-framing and pursuing their own research questions.

This paper firstly presents a history of the field account, to
discuss the development and evolution of digital research tools
for Buddhist literature studies, and it then gives a detailed
introduction and description of the ongoing project for building
the integrated digital research platform for Chinese Buddhist
literature. We believe that this paper can help readers
mastering the overall situation and development of digital
resources for the study of Chinese Buddhist literature, and that
it may provide important reference information for developing
similar systems in other areas.

Teaching Southern Hokkien as Part of the Curriculum in a Chinese
Department

Bernhard Fuehrer/professor of School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London

Southern Hokkien (Minnanhua,
Taiwanese), one of the southern Chinese regional languages, is rarely taught in Chinese programmes at European or American universities. This paper sheds light
on the design and pedagogical aims of a new comprehensive introduction to Southern Hokkien, and discusses some of the potential benefits of
teaching languages such as Southern Hokkien and Cantonese in addition to Mandarin. It also deals with aspects of Southern Hokkien that are found beneficial for efficient acquisition of this language outside its natural linguistic environment.

In recent times, the theories of the social sciences have found
their way into German sinology, while traditional philology has
often been neglected. Although appearing up-to-date, these
studies often lack a proper foundation, which entails working
with primary source material. However, conflicts between new and
old styles of research are not only a contemporary phenomenon.
Already in the 19th and 20th century
researchers fought about the proper approach to the then
relatively new field of Sinology. In this article I will
introduce the work of one of the University of Leipzig’s most
famous linguists and Sinologists, Georg von der Gabelentz
(1840- 1893). Best known for his contributions to our
understanding of Chinese grammar, the discussion here will also
include his lesser known studies about Chinese philosophers and
culture.

Taking Gabelentz as an example, this article tries to
answer the question of whether we always have to search for new
fields of study and new approaches to our material or if it is
sometimes more fruitful to recollect and reflect the
contributions of the old

In March 1867 the American Rover wrecked off the coast of
southern Taiwan. In its aftermath Chinese and American officials
interacted for the search and possible rescue of its victims.
Their unhappy collaboration contributed in the end to the
respective framing of new discourses about governance and
civilization. Modern wrecks generally do not feature very
largely in Sinology. Nor does the Rover constitute a major
historical episode. Meanwhile much has been done in recent years
concerning historical sources about Taiwan, including aspects of
the Rover. This paper is an attempt to gain new perspectives by
drawing upon these materials.

Collecting Antiquities in the Late Northern Song: A Network
Analysis Approach

Ya-hwei Hsu∕associate professor
in Department of History,
National Taiwan University

The Chinese antiquarian tradition of studying
words on metal and stone antiquities, jinshixue, had occupied a
prominent place in traditional scholarship since its genesis in
the eleventh century. During the early half of the twentieth century,
this traditional scholarship found its way into the modern
discipline of paleography, history, archaeology, and art
history. Recently, as “digital humanities” are emerging as a
result of internet technologies, humanities scholars are
exploring the potentials of new digital analytic tools and the
insights they promise to bring. This paper will be an experiment
of this kind. It applies network analysis to the study of Song
antiquarian catalogues to map out different antiquarian circles
and to trace their evolvement through time. Finally, it will
examine related political and cultural context that helped
shaping the development. With the new research tool, this
research will raise different kinds of questions to the
centuries-old scholarship ofjinshixue.

Who Will Read What You Write? Creating and Sustaining Scholarly
Networks and Communitiesin the Digital Age, with Special
Attention to the Issue of Place in Song History

Patricia Buckley Ebrey∕professor in
Department of History,
University of Washington

This talk addresses two issues. The first is how new
technologies of research interact with other social and economic
conditions to shape the work done by scholars in Chinese history
in the U.S.Central here is the development of powerful new
research tools that have changed the way we do research, coupled
with growth in numbers of Chinese history PhDs, their increasing
specialization, and their geographical scattering. The most
valuable tools, such as ScriptaSinica and CNKI, are often
unavailable to scholars not at research universities, leading to
a growing inequality in access to research tools. The second
half of this talk focuses on an example of a research trend
--new interest in the state’s relation to its territories.
Important recent books that bear on this include Ruth Mostern’s
analysis of the fiscal relationships between the central
government and its prefectures, and Sukhee Lee’s study of the
ways the central government mattered in local society, based on
a case study of Mingzhou. At the 2014 Middle Period conference,
there were many interesting papers on places in the north, up to
now much less studied that places in the south. Close study of
places in the north often requires use of archaeological or
epigraphical evidence as there are many fewer collected works by
authors from the north after the Northern Song. Scholars who are
doing cutting edge research on these topics are among those
without access to key sources such as CNKI and ScriptaSinica.
Helping such scholars stay active and engaged is in our
self-interest, I argue, since the more PhDs who stay active in
research, the more readers we will have—and all of us need
readers for our work.

In recent years, digital humanities has been receiving increased
attention in the global academic circles. However, In the
research area, digital humanities is often misleading to
digitalization. Many of the digital humanities researches are
still conducted by traditional humanities scholars, who hire
information technology (IT) experts only to digitize their raw
research materials. Under this circumstance, the humanities
scholars have difficulties in anticipating the research results,
while the IT experts, who do not have profound understanding
about the humanities studies, merely succeed in the development
of incomplete humanities data. In the Education area, Coding
education has been introduced to the secondary schools in many
countries. However, humanities studies in higher education were
not concerned about how to deal with the "born-digital" students
from secondary education.

Although education is the only solution that we can rely on to overcome
this situation, the educational methodologies for digital
humanities are still in its early stage. If there is a certain
curriculum for whom want to learn diverse digital technologies,
it is still hard to find any educational course specifically
designed for humanities scholars. Moreover, it can be said that
developing educational methods for “born-digital students” is at
a standstill, as most professors in universities are not
familiar with these digital technologies.

Digital humanities can be successful, only when humanities scholars are
able to produce digital data of humanities knowledge, and the
knowledge data can be broadly used in the common society. Also,
the humanities scholars should be able to operate various
digital technologies to improve their work. In this sense, this
paper aims to design a humanities research and education
curriculum for humanities scholars, in order to help them
perform their research in digital environment.

The core characteristics of this course are as follows. First, the
purpose of this course is to develop the digital literacy of
humanities scholars, to enhance the communication between
humanities scholars and IT experts. Second, this course is
strongly recommended to university professors and PhD students,
in order to promote the proliferation of digital humanities.
Third, this course provides the participants with the
opportunities for building and analyzing humanities data, using
digital technologies, in an attempt to upgrade their practical
ability to adapt digital humanities.

On
recent tide of studies of environmental history, terms
of“huanjing” and “ziran” are frequently applied by scholars to
portray similar imagination or concept in Chinese society.
However, the wonder to identify Chinese “huanjing” and “ziran”
in traditional Chinese linguistics, or further to the accuracy
of translating English “environment” and “nature” are rarely
questioned. This study aims to trace the history of creating “huanjing”
and “ziran” in modern Chinese following by cross-examining
similar terms in contemporary period on linguistic terminology.
The authors hope to study these questions both by conventional
historical methods and advanced approach of digital humanity. By
doing so, the study is also an attempt to probe the possibility
of using digital humanity on historical researches.

Based on material coming from the
biji genre (scattered
writings) during the Wei-Jin Southern and Northern dynasties,
this article analyses the interactive relations between disease
in medieval China and different modalities of knowledge and
discourse done from the point of view of spatial relations,
historical event, social mobility, perception patterns and the
structure of feeling, and explores the atmosphere of writing
created by the texts of the
biji as well as the numerous metaphors concerning social culture subsumed in them.

In ShishuoXinyu, A new Account of the Tales of the World, disease is situated in
the context of personnel evaluation and linguistic eloquence,
and often lacks details about its cause, condition or treatment,
sometimes it is used allegorically to make personal claims or
for political demands. Occasionally, a specific disease
narrative is constituted even through a person’s words and
behavior being transformed into a disease, which reveals the
generic uniqueness of the historical anecdotes genre,
zhirenxiaoshuo, coming
from the individual will and collective taste. In the stories
about the strange,
zhiguaixiaoshuo, such as
Mingxiangji, disease
is the juncture, variable or result happening between something
abnormal and an extraordinary event, each of which makes evident
the disease, an allegory for the predicaments of life. The
diversity in the standpoints and beliefs of the compilers of
such stories influences the differences in the emotions,
narration, imagination and interaction between the sick person,
the one who causes the disease and who relieves it.

In terms of research methods, the article applies modern
technology while on the one hand building thematic database by
means of GIS, and provides a platform drawn by maps for the
retrieval and visualization of texts, and on the other, pushes
further the possibilities of a multidisciplinary collaboration
between digital technologies and humanities research, and probes
into the differences about how they both ask questions, their
epistemological systems and way of thinking. The article is a
case study, which adds a new perspective and possibility to the
traditional study of textual worlds in a time when modern
sinology faces challenges to break through the constraints of
time-space, cultural diversity and categories of knowledge.

It is generally agreed that poetry is an important part of the
pre-modern Chinese culture; it best represents the
sophistication of this culture prior to its encounter with the
West and subsequent transformations in the modern era when
poetry in classical forms was marginalized,though it never
really ceased existing. Poetry attracted the interest of Western
scholars later than Confucius, the
Yijing, or the Ming
and Qing fiction and drama, but poetry studies still have a
respectable history nearly as long as the academic Sinology
itself. At certain periods of time traditional Chinese poetry
also has the privilege of becoming an object of admiration
outside of the academic circles and inspiring new trends in
western poetry (the fact that the enthusiasm for Chinese poetry
among western poets was often conditioned by gross
misunderstandings is not important here).

Though it has never been at the center of the interest of
Sinology, numerous books and articles dedicated to Chinese
poetry have been published so far, including translations done
by specialists and amateurs alike. Following the research in
this area of Sinology during the last nearly two hundred years, we can see continuity as well as discontinuity and changes in interests, approaches and methodologies. The scope of
understanding of the tradition of poetry writing in China has certainly been steadily broadening, as did the sensitivity to
its culturally specific dimensions. At the same time it has to
be admitted that only a very small part of the heritage of
Chinese poetry has been explored by Western Sinologists, and
that the knowledge of the canon of pre-modern Chinese poetry
(however we define it), including cultivation of the basic
prerequisites for aesthetic appreciation of the poetic heritage of China, have not become yet an indispensable part of the
Chinese language and culture education in Western universities.

This presentation will elucidatespan lang="zh-tw"> Western interest in classical
poetry past and present, with special focus on the basic issues
hindering more widespread presence of poetry in the Sinological
education, including the difficulty of the language and lack of
relevant dictionaries and other tools, as well as translations
with good scholarly annotations indispensable for a student. New possibilities offered by digital resources will be touched upon as well.

Textual
Analysis of Complete Tang Poems for Discoveries and
Applications: A Computational Perspective

Chao-Lin Liu,CChun-Ning Chang,Chu-Ting Hsu

Wen-Huei Cheng,Hongsu Wang, Wei-Yun Chiu

Complete
Tang Poems
(CTP) is the single
most important collection for studying Tang poems, which
qualified as a very
important part of Chinese literature.
CTP was officially
compiled during the Kangxi years of the Qing dynasty, and
includes more than 40,000 poems, totaling more than 3 million
characters, that were authored by more than 2000 poets.
Employing linguistic theories and computational tools, we
analyze the contents of CTP for a wide variety of explorations.

Juyi Bai, the most popular poet in CTP, has more than 2500 works
in CTP, followed by Fu Du’s more than 1000 works and Bai Li’s
nearly 900 works. Other poets who had more than 500 works in CTP
are Qi Ji, Yu-Xi Liu, Zhen Yuan, Shang-Yin Li, Xiu Guan, Ying-Wu
Wei, Gui-Meng Lu, Zhang-Qing Liu, Hun Xu, and Ran Jiao. Some of
the works collected in CTP were not complete but just pairs of
statements.

Colors for poems are like sounds for movies. They nurture
feelings and imageries of the artistic works. By analyzing the
total percentage of using “白髮”
(bai2 fa3, gray hair),"白頭”(bai2
tao2, white head), “白首”
(bai2 shou3, white head), “白鬚”(bai2
syu1, white beard), “白骨”(bai2
gu3, white bone), and “白髭”(bai2
zi1, white mustache) in poems, it is possible to peek into the
differences of the main themes of poets’ works. Hao-Ran Meng,
Shang-Yin Li, and Ting-Yun Wen rarely used these terms in their
works (less than 2%). In contrast, we could encounter these
terms in Fu Du’s and Juyi Bai’s works more than 7% of the time.
Both Du and Bai were considered as poets who cared very much
about the societies for people.

Antithesis[1]
is a constrained form of collocation in Tang poems, and they are
instrumental for mining relationships of corresponding words. It
is very interesting to find out that “白雲”
(bai2 yun2, white cloud) collocated with “明月”
(ming2 yue4, bright moon) and “流水”
(liu2 shui3, running water), that “白日”
(bai2 ri4, bright sun) collocated with “青春”
(qing1 chun1, young age) and “青山”
(qing1 shan1, mountains), that “白髮”
(bai2 fa3, gray hair) collocated with “青山”
and “青雲”
(qing1 yun2, blueish clouds), and that “白髮”
and “青 雲”
were used a pair of antithesis at least 26 times in CTP.

It is possible to focus on one-character color words as well. We
can see that “白”
(bai2, white) is the most popular color in Tang poems. That “白”
corresponds to “青”
(qing1, blue) and “黃”
(huang2, yellow) and that “碧”
(bi4, green) corresponds to “紅”
(hong2, red) and “青”
are among the interesting findings.

We can also investigate social networks among poets by searching
some keywords in CTP. Poet’s social networks are useful for
literary and historical studies, e.g., the China Biographical
Database Project at Harvard University. Poets may give their
poems to friends, they may write a poem after visiting their
friends, and they may just miss their friends by producing a
poem. Poets’ poems may record these events. In CTP, at least
eight poets mentioned Bai Li in 15 of their works.

The elite status of CTP in Chinese literature qualifies her
contents to be used as the basis for some literary applications,
such as couplet suggestions. We can use the corresponding words
in CTP for making couplets, although some of the terms, e.g., “長安”
(zhang2 an1, Xian City nowadays) will be
an out-of-dated surprising term for modern youngsters.

With the aforementioned applications, we demonstrated the
potentials of computational tools of natural language
processing, which is a key ingredient of a fast-growing research
field – Digital Humanities. Computational tools, such as
information retrieval, textual analysis, and text mining, cannot
accomplish deep research yet, but they can help researchers find
and collect much more relevant research material with
astonishing efficiency. We hope that the CTP examples we will
report in the conference will serve as convincing illustrations.

[1]“Antithesis”
is not a perfect translation of “對仗”.
“對仗”
requires two terms to have opposite relationships in
pronunciations, but does not demand the terms to be
opposite in meanings. In English, “antithesis” carries a
rather obvious demand for two referred terms to be
opposite in meanings.

What do we mean when we speak about "literary topics”? In Western
critical discourse, the notion of the topic was used by
Aristotle (Rhetoric) and Cicero (Topica) to refer to sources of argumentation, a template by which an argument might be
constructed. For Curtius

(EuropeanLiterature and the Latin
Middle Ages), the topic was a constitutive element of literary composition, a recurring theme or phrase that organized the
development of an argument in aliterary text. For the study of
Chinese literature, we typically use the term “topic”and"subtopic” (the latter term following Stephen Owen in his
Traditional Chinese Poetry andPoetics) as ways of organizing
literary texts within a given genre (usually poetry, but also fiction) through thematic categories. This is a practice that
mirrors both the practices ofleishu and modern anthological
organization. From the perspective of literary informationmanagement, one might begin by considering the origins of these
practices, the reasons foradopting thematic rubrics to group
together texts within a family tree.

The notion of “topic” in topic modeling is not unrelated to its usage in
literary theory. How the topic model works, on a basic level, is
to examine the documents a particular corpus bymeans of a set
of probabilistic algorithms that returns the hypothetical
“topics” that wouldhave generated the documents. These topics
are a kind of analytical fiction, since the documents were never
constructed by such means, but they provide valuable insight
into latent textual structures—not unlike the more intentional
structures of Aristotelian topoi. To read literature through
algorithmic means is, however, to change the concept of what it
means to read, given that the “output” of the topic modeling
algorithm is not an interpretation. What this paper willexplore
is the possibilities and the limits of a topic-based approached
to literary studies.